Setting up your project – Knowledge Base

How to create a project (video tutorial)
Use Cases
Useful links
Groups vs Tags
What is Target URL?

What is a Project?

SE Ranking’s Projects are dedicated workspaces for tracking one website and all its SEO data. This includes keyword rankings, competitors, audit results, and more. Each project is tied to a specific domain or URL.

Follow the step-by-step video tutorial below to learn how to create a project:

Read transcript

Use Cases

International Website

Option 1: Create a project under the main domain (recommended), include subdomains, and add search engines by language and region.

Option 2: Use language- or region-specific paths like /fr, /es, or /de if your website targets different audiences using URL paths. In this case, select the domain/path structure when creating the project.

Use both Google Desktop and Mobile search engines to get full visibility across devices.

E-commerce

E-commerce websites often have paths like /shop, /support, or /blog to segment different areas such as stores, help centers, or content sections.

Start with keyword tracking:

Identify your most relevant keywords — not every keyword needs to be tracked.
Group keywords by product categories, brands, seasonal collections, or bestsellers using Groups.
Tag keywords by search intent — informational (blog), transactional (product), or navigational (brand).
Track performance across relevant search engines like Google and Bing, on both Desktop and Mobile.
Create separate projects for different countries or regions. For example, it.com can be tracked as a separate project with Italian keywords and localized search settings.

Competitor Benchmarking

Add 3 to 5 competitors to your project to monitor their keyword strategy, landing pages, and backlinks.

You can also create separate projects for tracking key landing pages, like example.com/voucher, to analyze the visibility of specific promotions or campaigns.

Useful links

Groups vs Tags

What's the difference?

Groups = folders	Tags = labels
Used to organize keywords by category or topic. Examples: Online Bookstore: Group: `fiction`, `non-fiction`, `children’s books` Fitness App: Group: `workouts`, `nutrition`, `sleep tracking` Note: One keyword belongs to only one group.	Used to describe a keyword’s purpose or intent. Examples: Online Bookstore: Keyword: `buy mystery novels` Tags: `transactional`, `product` Fitness App: Keyword: `how to improve sleep` Tags: `informational`, `blog` Note: One keyword can have multiple tags.

What is Target URL?

The Target URL is the page you intend to rank for a keyword.

Example:
Keyword: book Rome city tour
Target URL: travelagency.com/rome-tours

This helps in detecting if the wrong page is ranking (i.e., homepage instead of product page) and in avoiding keyword cannibalization (when multiple pages compete for the same keyword).

Keyword Lists per Search Engine

You can track a different set of keywords on each search engine. Each keyword is linked to the search engines you choose, so the same phrase can be tracked on one engine and not another. The keyword text itself is shared: a single keyword record can't hold different wording for Google and Bing — to phrase something differently for another engine, add it as a separate keyword and link it only to that engine.

Keywords can be assigned to:

Google Desktop
Google Mobile
YouTube
Bing
Yahoo!

Example: A mobile user may search “coffee near me”. Only track it on Google Mobile.
This gives you the most accurate results by device and region.

How tracked keywords are counted

Your keyword limit counts each keyword–search engine pair, not each unique keyword. A keyword uses one unit for every search engine and region it's tracked in. If you link a keyword to only some of the project's search engines, it uses units only for those.

Each search engine you link a keyword to counts separately. Google Desktop, Google Mobile and Bing are three.
Each additional region or location for a search engine counts separately too.
The same keyword in two projects counts once in each project.

Example: 100 keywords tracked on Google Desktop and Google Mobile in one region use 100 × 2 = 200 units. Add a second location and it's 100 × 2 × 2 = 400 units.

Local Marketing grid tracking uses its own allowance, not your keyword limit. Each keyword counts once for every point on the grid, so 10 keywords on a 5×5 grid use 10 × 25 = 250 keyword-point combinations. Running checks weekly or monthly changes how often they run, but not how much of the allowance they use.

For how AI prompts are counted, see the AI Results Tracker FAQ.